“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”
Nor, she said, did she.
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”
To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.
“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.
I thought about noting this over the weekend, but I couldn’t find a way to write about it without being disrespectful to the dead. So: Mike “Mad Mike” Hughes.
Mr. Hughes “didn’t really care if the Earth was flat, and was fully ready to concede his error once he could see it with his own eyes in a final stunt that he was working towards,” the post read.
Mr. Shuster, his publicist, maintained that Mr. Hughes’s professed flat-Earth beliefs were simply intended to garner money and publicity for his stunts.
“He was eccentric and believed in some government conspiracies, for sure, but it was a P.R. stunt,” Mr. Shuster said.